Meet the man fighting city hall to rename natural gas

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This week:

• Meet the man fighting city hall to rename natural gas
• What’s this about a meat tax?
• The Caribbean looks to Trudeau to put climate change funding on world’s agenda

Meet the man fighting city hall to rename natural gas

Eddie Dearden is a man on a semantic mission. 

A former chemical engineer in the coal industry, Dearden has been writing letters and showing up at council meetings this year, urging B.C. municipalities to change the term natural gas to “fossil gas” in official documents. 

Why? Because he believes it would make clear to the public the need to phase the fuel out in the face of climate change.

“The term natural gas does not explicitly convey the fossil origins of such gas, leading to potential misunderstandings and hampering policy-making,” he told What On Earth.

Learning about climate change a decade ago spurred Dearden to switch careers from the fossil fuel industry and into sustainable home design. The heat dome that hit western North America in June 2021 inspired him to do even more.

“It was a really terrifying night for me, the hottest night,” he said, describing the worry he felt over the health and safety of his then one-year-old daughter. “It was 30 C in our house in the middle of the night.”

Feeling the need to act, Dearden began advising clients not to use natural gas in the homes he was designing for them. 

“They would really resist. They just started saying the most amazing things back to me, like, ‘But it’s natural,’ or ‘It’s green, it’s good,'” he said. “[These were] smart, educated people, and their words were showing that they did not know what natural gas is.”

Dearden said when he started using the term “fossil gas,” however, many more clients agreed to keep it out of their homes. 

Primarily composed of methane, natural gas has major climate implications. It’s a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, with greater ability to trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.  

Because it’s cleaner to burn than coal, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers says natural gas can play an important role in reducing GHG emissions. A number of studies have cast doubt on the idea, including a recent one in the journal Environmental Research Letters, which showed that even small methane leaks during drilling, processing or transportation can put natural gas on par with coal when it comes to carbon emissions intensity.

FortisBC, a B.C. utility that provides natural gas as well as electricity, declined an interview request, but in an email to CBC said it is “working to increase the supply of low-carbon and renewable energy, like Renewable Natural Gas derived from organic sources.”

When it comes to the general public, research has shown that terminology affects perceptions of natural gas. Examples both in Canada and around the world suggest “fossil gas” is catching on. 

Metro Vancouver, a federation of municipalities in southwest B.C, now uses “fossil gas” in some official documents. In an email to CBC, the organization said  “ensuring common understanding of basic terms is fundamental to climate literacy and building support for climate action.” 

After some back-and-forth discussion, the New York Climate Action Council opted to use “fossil natural gas” in a recent climate plan. Last December, the Language Council of Sweden, a government department that gives recommendations about the best use of Swedish words, recommended “fossil gas” should be the primary term used to describe natural gas.  

Linnea Hanell, a language expert with the Swedish council, acknowledged that action is vital to finding solutions to climate change, but said semantics can also play a role. 

“Useful terminology can make a difference to these vital conversations that we need to have,” she said.

Whistler municipal council has so far refused Dearden’s request. Mayor Jack Crompton said in a recent public meeting that council decided its efforts were better spent on action — such as improving public transit — than semantics. Crompton also told CBC via email that the climate-related words council uses are guided by official provincial and federal documents. 

In an emailed statement, Natural Resources Canada said natural gas is a generally accepted term used by industry, governments and academia. 

“As for language shifting from this term to others, we are constantly monitoring how discussions evolve,” the statement continued, adding that “today’s use of gas is getting increasingly clean as companies work towards minimizing and abating emissions associated with its production, transportation and usage.” 

Dearden hasn’t been able to convince any B.C. municipalities to change their wording, although North Vancouver said via email that it is considering his suggestion. 

Undaunted, he’s taking his campaign to another level, with a recent letter to B.C.’s environment and climate change minister, which included a draft of a potential private members’ bill called the “Fossil Gas Clarification Act, 2023.”

Ultimately, he said, clear language would help people make climate-friendly decisions. 

“If people can just easily see what a fossil carbon product is, at least they can make a choice,” he said. “We just need to get people informed of the fossils in their life.”

— Rachel Sanders

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The Big Picture: What’s this about a meat tax?

Earlier this month, Claire Coutinho, Britain’s energy security and net zero secretary, went viral after suggesting in a speech at the Conservative Party conference that the opposition Labour Party was planning to introduce a “meat tax.” When Sky News journalist Sophy Ridge pressed her (repeatedly) to provide evidence that Labour had in fact broached such a policy, Coutinho prevaricated and vaguely suggested Labour’s broader climate strategy would be a financial burden on working-class families.  

Environmentalists have long said that meat production — particularly beef — is a massive contributor to global emissions. But as Coutinho demonstrated, seeding the idea that your political opponents want to deter meat-eating is yet another front in the culture war. Back in 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump, along with one of his advisers, attacked Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, co-author of the Green New Deal proposal, for wanting to abolish hamburgers. What AOC actually said, in a radio interview, was “we’ve got to address factory farming. Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

No one in the U.K. is calling for a meat tax — but if cutting emissions is a legitimate goal, maybe someone should, suggests this essay in The Conversation. The piece states that “price interventions on meat and other emissions-intensive foods are probably needed to meet environmental targets in the food sector.” Addressing the notion that a meat tax would put the working class at a disadvantage, the piece argues that by and large, affluent households spend more on meat than the rest of the population and could afford to pay a bit more. As well, if a meat tax was broadly introduced, the government could channel the revenues “back to consumers in monthly or annual payments directly to their bank accounts,” sort of like Canada’s carbon tax.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• In 1905, a Canadian named George Cove invented household solar panels and a backup battery that gained widespread attention and appeared poised to make clean energy widely available. Then in 1909, Cove was kidnapped, and business fizzled. University of Oxford researcher Sugandha Srivastav shares his story in The Conversation and asks if it was really inevitable that fossil fuels would dominate the 20th century.

• Many communities have opposed solar panels, worrying they’ll generate toxic waste. Scientists from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory explain why those worries are “unfounded” and hope showing that will speed up the clean energy transition.

The Caribbean looks to Trudeau to put climate change funding on world’s agenda

Caribbean leaders meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week are hoping Canada will push their concerns — such as the profound threat they face from climate change — higher on the international agenda.

Trudeau is taking a break from domestic politics and his engagement on the Israeli-Hamas conflict to co-chair a three-day meeting with leaders of the Caribbean economic and political bloc CARICOM.

St. Lucia’s Prime Minister Philip Pierre, speaking to reporters last Friday, outlined the issues that would be on the agenda as Ottawa hosted the Canada-CARICOM summit through to Thursday.

Pierre, CARICOM’s lead on climate change, said the world is not on track to meet the goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement. That agreement commits countries to working toward limiting warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.

The planet is inching closer to surpassing that target; the United Nations says the world already has warmed by at least 1.1 C.

According to the UN, global climate pledges have placed the world on track for a temperature rise of between 2.4 C and 2.6 C by 2100.

Pierre said he hopes one outcome of the summit is a message to the world, through Canada, that the region needs help to cope with the effects of climate change — more frequent and intense tropical storms, rising sea levels and hotter days.

The region, he said, needs Canada’s assistance to secure better financing terms from private lenders and multilateral development banks to help it adapt to climate change.

“So hopefully, our issues can be promoted by Canada to the international world,” Pierre said.

Trudeau’s office said in a news release this week’s summit would be an opportunity for countries to advance shared priorities.

“The leaders will also work to fight climate change and address its impacts in the Caribbean, including by exploring ways to improve access to financing for Small Island Developing States in the Caribbean,” the statement reads.

This is Trudeau’s second meeting with CARICOM heads of government since his trip to the Bahamas in February. As it did then, the worsening security, political and humanitarian crisis in Haiti was expected to feature in the discussions in Ottawa this week.

Canada’s former Jamaican high commissioner Robert Ready said this week’s summit is about strengthening the ties between this country and the region through an overdue meeting. Canada has been focused on Asia, Europe and Latin America of late, but within the last three years Ottawa has pushed to re-engage with CARICOM, which represents a region that is home to 16 million people.

“While there are a lot of Canadians who travel south as tourists, I think both sides have tended in the past to take each other for granted,” said Ready, who sits on the board of the Canada Caribbean Institute.

— David Thurton

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